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Monday, 2 December 2013

Euro-Realism: Burke, Payne and the EU's Twenty-Ninth State

Alphen,
Netherlands. 2 December.A senior
European Council official last week described the European Commission to me as “Europe’s
twenty-ninth state”.This got me
thinking about the instinctive unease millions of we ordinary Europeans feel about
the concentration of unaccountable powers taking place in Brussels.Edmund Burke and Thomas Payne would undoubtedly
have seen a passing resemblance between Brussels today and Louis XVI’s corrupt ancien regime (read
Tocqueville) and George III’s remote and incompetent colonial government of
British North America prior to the American and French revolutions.So, where does the EU’s twenty-ninth government sit between Tom Payne’s
principle of rights or Burke’s ideas about representation and taxation?

With
growing public scepticism over ‘Project Europe’ and with paralysis hard-set between
those that pay and those that receive the EU has become unreformable.Instead, Europe’s unofficial leader
Chancellor Merkel has retreated into a kind of muddling through.Faced with Merkel’s caution and innate public
scepticism hard-line federalists such as Guy Verhofstadt and his Commission friends have of late resorted to talking only about the Euro and how to save it through
deeper integration.They thus avoid the
bigger constitutional implications that such integration through the back
door implies.

Burke was
no fan of democracy but he did believe in representation.He believed government demanded a level of
intelligence and knowledge that at the time was to his mind only to be found
amongst the elite…recognise it?Indeed,
Burke thought democracy would lead to demagoguery because it would arouse
dangerous passions amongst the Great Unwashed.Burke also warned that democracy could lead to the persecution of
minorities if the ‘protection’ they enjoyed from the upper classes was removed.Today’s debates over intra-EU immigration and free movement captures just a smidgen of Burke’s concerns.

Payne’s
thinking was genuinely revolutionary.His Rights of Man provided the
philosophical underpinnings for both the American and French Revolutions.Indeed, by placing the rights of the
individual front and centre Payne was consciously cutting Hobbes’ Leviathan down to size.Leviathan
trades absolute freedom of the individual for a form of security by imposing
equality - all individuals transfer all
rights to Leviathan in return for
security.Paine instead believed in a
form of utopian egalitarianism based upon an optimistic view of human nature.

What Payne
failed to realise was that far from building communities his concept of
universal rights could actually destroy them.Indeed, the essential difference between Burke and Payne came down to a
view of community which was expressed in their war of words over the role of
religion. As Alexis de Tocqueville also suggested
universal rights could create dangerous competition between individuals.

However, both
Burke and Payne rejected unelected, arbitrary and remote government.And it is at that philosophical juncture at
which the European Commission now resides – part Leviathan, part Rights of Man
and part guardian of elitist experiment.As Leviathan it is meant to
ensure ‘fairness’ by establishing a level playing field between EU
member-states.It uses the Rights of Man to justify its role as the
initiator of European legislation under the Lisbon Treaty.And, it sees itself as the true guardian of
the elitist concept of political union.

In the
absence of effective oversight the Commission has been encouraged to compete
for power with the very states that created it.What is dangerous is the yawning legitimacy and sovereignty gap between me the
citizen, the discredited European Parliament and the EU’s twenty-ninth state.

In that
light the constant attempts of the Great Unelected to extend their powers look
to many of we the citizenry (and would certainly have appeared to a latter day
Payne) as an attempt to shift arguments over power and its acquisition to one of competence.This was the essential argument of Thomas Hobbes
back in the seventeenth century and in their respectively corrupt forms it is what
the ancien regime and British North
America became.

The
parallels are striking.Commission no-president-of-mine
Barroso even echoes Hobbes when he warns that without further integration
Europe will return to a ‘state of nature’ and “warre of all against all”.This is dangerous self-serving nonsense.

Both
Louis’s ancien regime and British
North America ultimately fell because the costs they imposed were balanced neither
by effectiveness nor representation for those outside the ruling caste.The danger for the Commission is that as it
seeks to replace the nation-state as the government of Europe it will be seen more
as Hobbes’s unforgiving Leviathan
than either Payne’s Rights of Man or
Burke’s representative government.That
is why the Commission is not nor must it ever be the first or the twenty-ninth
EU state.

When
a form of governance is believed neither to be just nor effective by the people
in whose name it governs in time it will lead to rupture. Just look at history.

About Me

Julian Lindley-French is Senior Fellow of the Institute of Statecraft, Director of Europa Analytica & Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow, National Defense University, Washington DC. An internationally-recognised strategic analyst, advisor and author he was formerly Eisenhower Professor of Defence Strategy at the Netherlands Defence Academy,and Special Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of Leiden. He is a Fellow of Respublica in London, and a member of the Strategic Advisory Group of the Atlantic Council of the United States in Washington.
Latest books: The Oxford Handbook on War 2014 (Paperback) (2014; 709 pages). (Oxford: Oxford University Press) & "Little Britain? Twenty-First Strategy for a Middling European Power". (www.amazon.com)
The Friendly-Clinch Health Warning: The views contained herein are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of any institution.